Page 51
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker warns against watching sorrow without accepting its cost, then seeks a forehead kiss and a way to look without having to listen.
The speaker describes plains losing their underbelly and the sea losing its shell, then waits for somebody to kiss a forehead. The unusual knowone and some most remain as written in the passage about watching and listening. The canceled prefix adds no surviving words to the final statement, now you just get to see.
'The Heart Of the Matter' is a list of second-person propositions: 'You can see a sound and think what it must be', 'You can be an animal without a mind', 'You can not watch trouble and sorrow, / and get away with it'. It moves to losses in the landscape, 'The plaines have lost their underbelly / Surely the sea is losing it's shell', then to a head that 'ackes in the corner saying never cry', 'Waiting for somebody to kiss your forehead', and ends with 'suit up' and 'now you just get to see'.
The poem argues that sorrow must be faced, and pairs that demand with images of a world stripped of its protective layers. The repeated 'You can' openings give it the rhythm of instruction, while the late run of short phrases, 'awash, truth, yes, suit up,', turns it into self-encouragement. It closes on seeing rather than listening, a quieter form of acceptance.